[KS] 'Memoir' defames Korean culture

[HOLLEE MCGINNIS]

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Korea Hearald 
http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/news/2000/09/__03/20000907_0310.htm

[Letters to the Editor] 'Memoir' defames Korean culture 

     A few years after the Korean War, a waitress at a Seoul noodle shop falls
in love with an American soldier she meets. After a while, the GI disappears
and the waitress returns to her village, where she horrifies the locals by
giving birth to a mixed-blood daughter.

     Through years of harassment, which ranges from catcalls to stone
throwing, the woman toils in the rice field, trying to support herself and her
child. Finally the woman's father and brother decide to expunge the family's
shame and hang her from the ceiling of her tiny thatched hut while the little
girl looks on. The next day the child is dropped off at a filthy orphanage
where she is kept in a cage until an American couple adopts her.

     This, in a nutshell, is the first third of Elizabeth Kim's memoir "Ten
Thousand Sorrows: The Extraordinary Journey of a Korean War Orphan"
(Doubleday). Since its publication in May, the book's author has repeated her
sensational story to interviewers and audiences in the United States, Canada
and Britain.

     Reviewers have generally praised the book, comparing it to "Angela's
Ashes" while making clear that Kim packs twice as much hardship for your buck.
"I was in tears by the second page," raved the San Francisco Chronicle's
Andrea Behr. Alas, "Ten Thousand Sorrows" appears upon closer examination to
have a lot in common with Binjamin Wilkomirski's "Fragments" (1995), a
tearjerker about a pre-adoption childhood that was exposed as a hoax last
year.

     There is one important difference between Wilkomirski and Kim: The former
was shown to have been born in Switzerland, far from the Nazi concentration
camp he claimed to remember, whereas the latter is almost certainly telling
the truth about having come to America as a Korean adoptee.

     Having said that, Kim's description of Korean life, language and custom
is so wildly inaccurate, and her account of the Confucian "honor killing" so
improbable, that the only question for me is whether she herself believes what
she has written.

     For instance, she tells how Koreans harangued her every day with catcalls
of "honhyol, a despicable term that meant nonperson, mixed race, animal."
Honhyol is in fact a word used in polite conversation by educated Koreans,
even by mixed-blood Koreans themselves. The derogatory word is "tuigi." Now,
if a black woman claimed to remember an Alabaman childhood in which white
racists hounded her day in, day out by "that despicable term,
African-American," wouldn't that seem strange? But then, everything about
Kim's Korea is strange. This is a country where women work in the fields with
babies strapped to their chests, and wear hanboks with wide, kimono-like cuffs
and bow humbly to their little children. This is a country where rice is
farmed in December and people live on swept earth floors, Chinese-style. Even
so, they still manage to enjoy an ondol heating system, which presupposes a
covered stone floor.

     What makes all these inconsistencies especially fishy is Kim's refusal to
offer any information - years, names, locations, etc - which would allow a
researcher to check her story. When asked probing questions in interviews, she
casually backpedals.

     In the book, she claims that Korea has a "long accepted tradition" of men
murdering their disgraced female relatives. In interviews, however, she says
only that such killings take place everywhere.

     If "Ten Thousand Sorrows" was set in Ireland, and the author claimed to
remember daily espresso drinking, wheat farming in December and a widely
accepted tradition of "honor killings," the book would have been withdrawn
months ago.

     Why? Because Irish-Americans would not tolerate such outrageous
misrepresentations. Koreans, however, have registered no public protest at all
regarding "Ten Thousand Sorrows." Kim claims that some Korean-Americans have
even congratulated her on the book! With the Olympics drawing near, Korea
would do well to remember that its international image is not defined by gold
medal winners, whose names foreigners will forget even before the closing
ceremony, but by books that end up in public libraries and on university
reading lists.

     Brian Myers U.S.A.

     


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